We're 330-odd million strong here in the US. There are a handful of major changes we all know our country needs to put into a sustainable* state of affairs. Permit me to brainstorm a little...
1. Switch to a human healthy and Earth friendly average diet. Taking on the aggregate, we need to eat much less overall, more natural foods, way less meat and sodium and sugar, more fiber, and a constant variety of seasonal and native vegetables.
2. Switch to a human healthy and Earth friendly energy scheme. Carbon release free and non-nuclear waste producing, non-toxic and resource frugal. Living closer to work, walking or riding a bike to work, or switching to electric motor-bikes. Recycle everything.
3. Doing more physical activity that accomplishes something (as opposed to turning our diet into heat at the local gym), and keeps us healthier. Gardening, commuting with your own energy, social or individual sports (as opposed to "working out" alone or
4. More involvement in civic and socially redeemable activities: Spending a little of your time contributing to the social welfare in a way you believe makes a positive impact on your fellow humans. Helping people find work, helping homeless find shelter options that supports their active engagement in the productive side of humanity, helping others in "teach a person to fish" sorts of ways.
5. Broaden our understanding of our world's amazing wonder. Broad and deep. Know a little about everything (science and nature and engineering, politics, language, anatomy and physiology, design and architecture and art, history and culture, psychology and medicine, philosophy, music, ad naseum). The more we know, the more we are able to act in ways that align with any sort of goals. Read, discuss, watch educational media, write (to process and share),
6. Improve healthcare: Get costs under control, reduce the overall need by making good life health decisions, tend to our mental health, educate children from a young age on all aspects of healthy living and maintaining our health.
7. Get a grip on the deeper mysteries. We're going to die, how do we live to honor that fact. Religion help many to get approximate our relation to the almighty universe.
8. Balance our lives with respect to our careers and the above endeavors.
9. Fix education to support the big picture, fund it adequately, and respect the sacred role it has in bringing our young into society as one of us.
10. Establish ways to reduce the wage disparity so more Americans can be share in the fruits of their labor, improving motivation and the economic strength of our country.
But our behavior patterns are formed early and once they're set, it's hard to change. "My dad did it, so it's good enough for me." Once we get used to something, change means work and effort, mental gymnastics. Taken in a generational context, most real changes of attitude take a generation or sometimes many generations to shift, even if the benefits are clear. Look at smoking, racism, taxes. One promising example is the rapid move in attitudes toward homosexuals. In one generation, there has been a meaningful and positive shift from negative to more positive.
Our past success as a nation has made us what we are. Although we have some of the worlds greatest innovators and ambitious humans of the planet, and we need these specialists to do what they do with total focus, but we need everybody to rise to their potential so we can accomplish as much as we can to create the country we want. Our innate inclination to protect our children from struggle works against us and makes us weaker. A healthy family eliminates much of the hardship, and that is a good thing insofar as "we made it." But for the future generations, when children grow up feeling entitled to the fruit of their ancestor's labor, their tendency to work their asses off to make it on their own and perpetuate the strength that led to their freedom from struggle. We have to find causes worth struggling for and work our asses off to make them work. It's a little bit of a contradiction and counter-intuitive. Like working out in a gym producing nothing, I don't want our children to struggle on academic issues or stress out from artificially induced senses of urgency. I would much rather they work through major problems in real life. Couldn't being out helping to build a levee connect them to their community, get them working hard and practicing their teamwork and leadership, and accomplish something, while allowing them to work hard and see the result of their efforts? Things like that.
But all of these major challenges facing us require a significant change of attitudes from one of "avoiding struggle" to "finding a problem worth overcoming and deciding to do it." One belittles and diminishes is as people; the other elevates our spirit and creates real self-esteem. At some point, we know when we're doing something real or playing a game. How do we switch from games to reality when the whole education system, the whole generation (with a small minority of exceptions) of parents and teachers and administrators were reared in that bubble?
*For the next couple hundred years, maybe? Longer than that and the mere scope of human population will wreak enough changes on the biosphere that our predictions and ideas today will almost certainly not be applicable to the sorts of engineering (social and otherwise) we'll have to do to sustain some sort of normal human population.
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